29 March 2015

"A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown --
Who ponders this tremendous scene --
This whole Experiment of Green --
As if it were his own! "
- A little Madness in the Spring by Emily Dickinson

In Old English the word wif referred to a woman, not necessarily a married woman. Then came the Middle English word midwife to describe the mistress of a household. The word housewife as currently understood is one of the words that fails into a category named by the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff "claiming an identity they taught me to despise."

No one has ever - as of yet - captured the poignancy that lurks in the word housewife better than the late Jayne Davison. Davison died in 1981 at age forty-nine from cancer. The year before she published The Fall of a Doll's House: Three Generations of American Women and the Houses They Lived In. Davison grew up in Summit, a streetcar suburb in northern New Jersey and lived for most of her adult life in the Boston area, Cambridge to be exact. It was the similar geographical background that attracted me to the book when it appeared; I intendded to avoid doing housework or becoming some man's chatelaine. I had seen reproductions of Sheila de Bretteville's Womanhouse (1973) and the several version of Femme Maison by Louise Bourgeois. Against all advice, I refused to take typing in school; I would not go quietly.

Both Jayne Davison and Louise Bourgeois are gone now. Davison's daughter Lesley Davison published an updated version of her mother's book To Make A House a Home: Four Generations of American Women and the Houses They Lived In (1994); the book contains dozens of photographs of their comfortable homes. When I was a girl living in Essex County New Jersey, in my childish myopia I thought everyone lived this life because all the people I knew did. I hope I am not nostalgic but I can't help but wish from time to time that I had been right about that. It seemed such a lovely world for a child but, as we have since learned as the doll's houses crumbled, it exacted a terrible price, as all idylls seem to do. I am still here, taking an admittedly housewifely pleasure in the spring cleaning of my apartment. This too is not without poignancy.

Sheila de Bretteville has migrated from the Womanspace project at UCLA to Yale University where she is the Director of the Yale Graduate Program in Graphic Design.

23 March 2015

I. Perched on a hillside overlooking the village of
Mezy-sur-Seine, this house looks like nothing so much as a luxury liner on the
crest of a wave.And there is some
poetic truth to this comparison. Villa Poiretis, arguably, the earliest example of what came to be known as ocean-liner chic during the inter-war years. Villa Poiret was also the first major design by architect Robert
Mallet-Stevens.

Fashion designer Paul Poiret had wanted a suburban retreat for his family for several years when he commissioned the young Mallet-Stevens in 1921; he had approached other architects, including Le Corbusier but was dissatisfied with their plans. Yet Poiret was also in a hurry to have a house built.
An avid yachtsman, he had purchased a property that would give him a front row seat for the boat races at the Summer Olympics scheduled for Paris in
1924.So eager, in fact, was Poiret that he moved into the
grounds-keeper's cottage as soon as it was finished in 1923.He never did get to live in his landmark
villa; there were delays in its elaborate construction, the House of Poiret went bankrupt in 1926, and the villa stood
empty and deteriorating until Poiret sold it in 1930 to the Rumanian actress
Elvira Popescu. It was Popescu who hired another architect, Paul Boyer, in 1932 to add the porthole windows.Popescu lived in the house until 1988, when it again became vacant and dilapidated; its current restoration began in 2008 and Villa Poiret is now recognized as a French national landmark.

Filmmaker Leos Carax knew this back story when he used Villa Poiret for a scene in his most recent film Holy Motors in 2012. A sophisticated and disorienting take on various film genres, Holy Motors takes the viewer on Surrealist Odyssey, his Odysseus isnamed Monsieur Oscar, the ship is a sleek
white stretch limo captained by his equally sleek assistant Celine.Together they tour Paris on a series of
mysterious engagements, each of which requires a different disguise for Monsieur,
who uses the back seat as his dressing room. They travel mostly by night
through half-lit landscapes that intimate ghostly events offstage. Carax, a Frenchman, was undoubtedly aware that Robert Mallet-Stevens was one of the first
architects to take an interest in cinema; his set designs forthe filmL'Inhumaine (1924)are
considered a masterpiece.

II. No one had a better biography for an
architectthan Robert Mallet-Stevens
(1886-1945); you could make a movie out of it. He was born in Maison- Laffitte,
a 17th centuryhouse designed by
Francois Mansart, an architect admired for his elegance and subtlety, qualities that Mallet-Stevens absorbed into his own vocabulary. Mallet-Stevenswas the son and grandson of art dealers and his mother was a niece of the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens. He was also the nephew of Suzanne Stevens, wife of the wealthy industrialist
Adolphe Stoclet.Their home in Brussels, the Palais Stoclet built in 1905 on the Avenue
Terneuven, was designed by Josef Hoffmann, architect of the Vienna Secession. Mallet-Stevens drew on Hoffman's design of Hoffmann's art colony Hohe Wartewhen he came to design his own, seven houses on rue Mallet-Stevens (1926-1938)
in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

Where Le Corbusier wanted to reinvent entire
cities, Mallet-Stevens worked primarily on individual commissions, most of them in
Paris, the city Le Corbusier would have razed if he had been given the chance.His ideas were less grandiose and he left behind no large theoretical work to
buttress his reputation but Mallet-Stevens was not the light-weight that he has sometimes been portrayed to be; his excellent taste in collaborators set him apart from the self-promoting Le Corbusier. You could say that his death was ill-timed, taking place before the great
post-war building boom. Nevertheless Mallet-Stevens was one of the two most
influential French architects of the 20th century. Period photographs of his work are limited, partly because Mallet-Stevens asked that his archives be destroyed after his
death.

III. “A little house, interesting to live in, to take
advantage of the sun.”

That was how Mallet-Stevens modestly described his
vision for his second important residence, designed for the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noialles. Soon after their marriage in 1923, the couple signed a contract with the architect to build them a summer home overlooking the Riviera. For this project Mallet-Stevens chose as his collaborators Elise Djo-Bouregois, Eileen Gray, Pierre Chareau, and Theo van
Dosberg!What began as a simple country retreat
became an “immobile ocean liner” withfifteen master bedrooms, swimming pool, squash court and a terrace for
games of boules, retracting bay windows, clocks controlled by a central
system, and a triangular-shaped 'Cubist' garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian.

The
clients, Charles and Marie-Laure, were wealthy art patrons with a taste for Surrealism; one of Marie-Laure's closest friends was Jean Cocteau. Her contemporaries
found something of the surreal in the Vicomtesse herself: her family tree included Russian aristocrats, Quakers,
and even the Marquis de Sade. Villa Noailles was featured in Man Ray's 1926 film Les Mysteres du Chateau de De, allowing a large public of moviegoers to glimpse a modernist masterpiece.What bankruptcy did to
Villa Poiret, World War II brought to Villa Noialles. In 1940, the
Italian army occupied the house, and forced its owners to leave. After
the war ended, the Vicomtesse returned, living there until she diedin 1970. The
City of Hyeres purchased Villa Noailles in 1973, and it is now an arts
center.

IV. At the same time that Mallet-Stevens was at work on
Villa Noialles, he was invited by the French government to design theirembassy pavilion for the International
Exposition of Decorative Arts Paris, 1925.His collaborators were Jan and Joel Martel, sculptor
twins who designed the famous Cubist palm trees (Arbre Cubiste) for
the garden in front of the pavilion. No stranger to world’s fairs, Mallet-Stevens had previously exhibited
designs in Brussels, London, and San Francisco. After the fair ended, the concrete trees were destroyed; other than in photographs they survive in the form of a wooden model now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (In the photograph at left of the Martel brothers' studio, a maquette of the palm tree is visible in the alocve at right.) Among the most avant-garde works at the exposition, the concrete trees were were mocked in the press; in one cartoon a puzzled gardener tried to decide whether to water them.

Mallet-Stevens and the Martel
brothers understood thatthe
introduction of reinforced concrete changed everything; without it modern building
is inconceivable“Athousand shapes are possible, unexpected
silhouettes spring up, often strange, but rational and sincere. Reinforced
concrete allows overhangs, the elimination of numerous points of support, and
the reduction of the various structural elements to a minimum.So the proportions are profoundly modified
and the aesthetic becomes different.” -Robert Mallet-Stevens in Architecture and
Geometry (1924).

V. “The events of human life, be they public or
private, are so intimately bound up with architecture, that the majority of
observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in the full reality of their
behavior, from the remnants of their public monuments or the examination of
their domestic remains.” - Honore de Balzac, excerpt from The Pursuit of the Absolute (1832).

In the The Unknown Masterpiece, an
otherwise ambiguous tale of the painter Francois Porbus, a man who is either a
total failure or a misunderstood genius, Balzac based the artist's studio on a
specific location, something he did over and over again. So vivid was Balzac’s word
picture ofthe artist in his studio,
down to its locationin the
rue des Grands-Augustins that Pablo Picasso took a studio there while he
painted Guernica the 1930s.After
reading The Unknown Masterpiece Picasso
wrote, “Thanks to the never ending search for reality, [Balzac's artist] ends
in black obscurity.There are so many
realities that, in trying to encompass them all, one ends in darkness.”

After a fashion life for Robert Mallet-Stevens, a humane modernist, ended in darkness. For all that fortune had showered on him, he spent his final five years exiled in France's southern free zone in order to protect his wife Andree, who was Jewish. He died on February 5, 1945, six months before the liberation of his beloved city on August 25. Andre Mallet-Stevens survived him, living on until 1980. The Pompidou Center held a retrospective on the works of Robert Mallet-Stevens in 2005.

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Why The Blue Lantern ?

A blue-shaded lamp served as the starboard light for writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette's imaginary journeys after she became too frail to leave her bedroom at the Palais Royale. Her invitation, extended to all, was "Regarde!" Look, see, wonder, accept, live.

"I think of myself as being in a line of work that goes back about twenty-five thousand years. My job has been finding the cave and holding the torch. Somebody has to be around to hold the flaming branch, and make sure there are enough pigments." - Calvin Tompkins